SaaS knowledge base best practices

For a SaaS company, an effective knowledge base isn't just a nice-to-have – it’s a need-to-have for scaling customer support, reducing churn, and driving product adoption. This guide explores some best practices for creating and maintaining a knowledge base that serves both your customers and your team.

Structure your content hierarchically

A well-organized knowledge base helps users find information quickly and reduces support ticket volume. Follow these guidelines to structure your content hierarchically:

• Create clear, logical categories based on your product's main features or use cases. When you’re mapping out the architecture of your knowledge base, try to think like someone who is seeing your product for the first time. What are the most important features? What will folks need to know first in order to gain value quickly? Make sure these things are prominent and easy to find.

• Use consistent naming conventions across all sections. Make sure you aren’t interchanging terms for the same thing. It can be easy to fall into synonym traps, so make a point of only using a single term for each aspect of your product, user type, etc.

• Include a "Getting Started" or "Quick Start" section somewhere prominent – ideally on the homepage of your knowledge base. This can do a lot of the heavy lifting for orienting your new users.

Write with your users in mind

SaaS products often serve different user personas. Your knowledge base should accommodate varying levels of technical expertise.

• Begin articles with a clear purpose statement. You don’t want your readers guessing if they’re in the right place or not.

• Break down complex processes into smaller steps. You don’t want to overwhelm your customers with the dreaded wall of text. Make it easy to follow, step by step.

• Include screenshots for visual learners. We all know UIs can change quite regularly for SaaS products, so this can entail some upkeep (unless you use a screenshot automation tool like LaunchBrightly). However, screenshots are invaluable for visual learners!

• Provide both basic and advanced information where relevant. Your audience is likely going to be widely varied in terms of technical knowledge. You want to make the basics easy to find and understand, but you can also supplement that with access to more technical documentation.

• Use technical terms consistently and maintain a glossary. As mentioned in the previous section, keeping your naming conventions consistent is hugely important for your knowledge base. A glossary feature can help a lot with this.

Maintain content quality

High-quality content builds trust and reduces support overhead. Like most things, it’s definitely more easily said than done, but these tips can help you create a framework for ensuring the quality of your content remains consistent:

• Establish clear style guidelines for all contributors. Create a style guide that anyone writing within your knowledge base can easily follow. This can include naming conventions as well as language guidelines (e.g. active/passive voice, customer-first language, etc.).

• Include last-updated dates on all articles (if your knowledge base software doesn’t already automatically do this).

• Regularly audit and update content. In many knowledge base software tools, you can set regular review intervals to automatically remind your writers to review and update content.

• Link related articles to create a comprehensive resource. This is another common feature of good knowledge base software and one to look for when you’re shopping for a knowledge base software solution.

• Use internal tagging methods to group and track different types of content for easier audits and updates.

Leverage analytics and user feedback

Data-driven improvements are crucial for SaaS knowledge bases!

• Track article performance metrics (views, reader ratings, etc.). Most knowledge base software should offer some kind of reporting or analytics feature. It can be an exceptionally valuable tool for learning where you can improve your content.

• Monitor search queries to identify content gaps. If you can see searches that don't lead to results in your knowledge base, you'll know more about what people are expecting to find in your knowledge base, which will help you know what content you should create next.

• Implement user feedback mechanisms. Article ratings and comments can help you discover opportunities to improve your content.

• Analyze support tickets to identify documentation needs. Are your Support staff regularly answering the same question? If so, you may need to create a new article (or make an existing article easier to find) on that topic.

Optimize for self-service

Self-service is key for scaling SaaS support efficiently. It's increasingly common for customers to prefer self-service above asking for support. You want to be sure your customers can access the type of help they want when they need it.

• Make sure your content is easily searchable. A good search feature is absolutely integral to your knowledge base. You need to be sure that your readers can find what they need quickly.

• Document common error messages and their solutions. Users will commonly do a search just for the error message they’re getting, so make sure they'll find what they need to solve that error.

• Provide code snippets and API documentation when relevant. Advanced users don’t want to ask Support for help. Be sure they can find what they need to do the more technical tasks that can be done with your product.

• Embed video tutorials for complex features. If you have the resources to create and maintain them, then video guides can be very useful to some users. We all have different styles of learning, so the more diverse our guides can be, the more helpful they are.

Integration and accessibility

Your knowledge base should integrate seamlessly with your product and support workflow. There are a number of ways this can be done:

• Implement in-app links to relevant documentation. You can use hover over tooltips or hyperlinked text within your app to bring users to relevant docs.

• Ensure mobile responsiveness. Even if people don’t use your app on mobile directly, you still want to be sure you aren’t limiting how people can find the help you’re providing them.

• Use contextual help widgets. It’s sometimes possible to embed a version of your knowledge base as a widget within your app. KnowledgeOwl has a widget that can be opened from within your app in a single click that will suggest content specific to where your users are located in your app.

• Do regular accessibility checks of your knowledge base. There are many different website accessibility checkers, including:

  • https://www.accessibilitychecker.org/
  • https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview
  • https://wave.webaim.org/
  • https://www.deque.com/axe/devtools/
  • https://www.browserstack.com/docs/accessibility/overview/introduction
  • https://www.powermapper.com/products/sortsite/

Scale your knowledge base

As your SaaS product grows, your knowledge base should evolve. It’s smart to plan ahead so you can be ready to take the next steps as needed.

• Create templates for different article types. This will ensure the writers of your knowledge base don’t have to repeat work. Templatizing your most common articles types will be immensely helpful to your team!

• Document content creation and maintenance processes. You can store your content creation and maintenance procedures alongside your style guide (mentioned above). If you have an internal knowledge base or an area of your public knowledge base that can be put behind a login, you can safely include internal-only docs on how to maintain the knowledge base.

• Train team members on your knowledge base best practices. Ensure your team knows where and how to find the answers to their questions.

• Do regular content reviews and updates. Finding outdated and irrelevant content within a knowledge base can erode the trust of your readers. You want to be sure you have processes in place that ensure your content stays up-to-date.

Security and access control

For SaaS companies, managing access to sensitive information is crucial. Our customers and colleagues trust us to keep their information private. There are a number of ways to ensure sensitive information stays secure:

• Implement role-based access control. You can limit who can read what in your knowledge base by sectioning off different categories and articles to different types of readers.

• Separate internal and external documentation. This could mean keeping two different knowledge bases: one for internal docs and one for external docs. Or you might section off areas of a single knowledge base to different audiences.

• Protect sensitive customer data in examples. Ensure all customer data in documentation is anonymized, using fake accounts and removing or obscuring any personally identifiable information.

• Use SSO when appropriate. With SSO, creating private reader accounts can be completely automated (including reader access controls).

A well-maintained knowledge base is a crucial asset for any SaaS company. By following these best practices, you can create documentation that scales with your business, satisfies users, and reduces support costs. Remember, a knowledge base is never "finished" – it should evolve alongside your product and user needs.